This Background is intended to provide the basic context of this patent application and it is not intended to describe a specific problem to be solved.
Vendors usually desire to have their goods available and easily located on the Internet. However, submitting offers to aggregator and search sites is not a simple task. The sites usually require the data to be submitted as structured data and creating the structured data file may be a challenge. At the same time, the aggregator and search sites have a significant amount of offer data already stored as structure data. Trying to match simple vendor descriptions to stored structured data has been a challenge.
Some web sites manually identify attributes to match on for each category, and define a matching between offer and product when the values for all these attributes agree. There are two main limitations of this approach: first, for every category, the vendor needs to manually identify attributes that are important to be matched on. Second, the matcher may have to rely on extracting all the important attributes correctly from the unstructured description of offers, and thus cannot handle missing attributes. In addition, since there is no notion of relative importance between attributes, any mismatched attribute (e.g. Color vs. brand) gets the same penalty.